Feature request for RSS News Aggregators: I want to be able to "clean up" my feed subscription list. I want to remove any RSS feed that hasn't published in the past XX days (default to 30).

Or, someone could write me a service. I upload an OPML file and it checks to see if anything was published to each of the feeds included within in the past XX days. If not, it deletes the feed and lets me download the new, cleaned, OPML file.

While we're thinking about such things, how about this? I import an OPML file with a list of feeds, say 1000 feeds. Then it looks at my list of feeds and finds me the 100 most common links from those feeds. That probably would give me a list of new feeds I'd like to check out.

One other problem with RSS? If someone changes their URL of their feed, like Albert Tanutama just did, why can't our news aggregator notice that that feed hasn't updated, look at the last post and look for the words "move/moved" or "change/changed" or "updated" or "new feed" and offer to let you delete that feed and/or add a feed at the new URL?

Speaking of moving on, if I want to switch aggregators, OPML is definitely great. You export the OPML from one news aggregator and import it into your new news aggregator. One problem, your reading data doesn't move. For instance, in my aggregator sometimes I leave things as "unread" because I want to come back to them later. It'd be interesting to see if I could also export my readership details.

Do you have any ideas for how to make news aggregators better?

10:18:58 AM